'Couples'

A few years ago, Normal Mailer the critic publicly advised John Updike to keep
his foot in the whorehouse door and
forget about his damn prose style. At the time this sounded typically elfin,
the kind of advice that Norman peddles by
the yard or the bucket, but Updike took it anyway, with rather startling
results. As occasionally happens, Mailer's
opinion turned out to be a little more sober than it looked.

Updike does, to be sure, take the famous style for several lengthy airings in
this new novel, but he keeps it on a
strong chain the rest of the time. Also, his whorehouse is some distance from
Mailer's, at times more ethereal, at
other times more like the inside of a lab. But such as it is, he undoubtedly
keeps his foot in it. This question should
probably be gotten over with quickly, because rumor has it that "Couples" is a
dirty book. But although Updike does
call all the parts and attachments by name, so does the Encyclopaedia
Britannica. And if this is a dirty book, I don't
see how sex can be written about at all.

Anyhow Updike's treatment of sex is central to his method, which is that of a
fictional biochemist approaching
mankind with a tray of hypersensitive gadgets. One pictures him starting his
inquiry somewhere down on the beach,
where the bivalves cluster and separate for reasons best known to themselves;
proceeding cautiously inland to queer,
box-like habitations, feats of engineering, man's ingenious nesting habits; and
finally to man himself, clustering and
separating, sure enough, forming couples and dissolving them, accreting whole
communities, and smashing them up,
for reasons every bit as obscure as the bivalves'.

The community of "Couples" is a peculiar sub-group, spawned by World War II and
already half-extinct. They are
the people who wanted to get away from the staleness of the Old America and the
vulgarity of the new; who wanted
to live beautifully in beautiful surroundings; to raise intelligent children in
renovated houses in absolutely authentic
rural centers. Eventually, they brewed up their own kind of staleness and
vulgarity; the children were left to shift for
themselves, and were lucky to grow up no worse than square; the beautiful
surroundings became over-built; the
wrong people moved in; America caught up with them. Updike's slide-lecture on
this crowd skewers them better
than any sociological study has done, or could do.

We meet them the way we meet actual people, that is, vaguely. Updike does the
introductions like a preoccupied
host -- that's Frank Appleby over there, does something in stocks, I believe;
that's his wife Janet or Marcia (you
didn't catch which). For pages we flounder like new people in town. Is Appleby
the one who dances badly, or is he
the professor at M.I.T.? We hear the noise they make together, see the group-
face, but still can't make out which is
which.

This means that later, as we follow their more specific doings, their adulteries
and their basketball games, we can
always pick up the dull, meaningless roar of the first cocktail party. Bit by
bit, the gossip comes in. Appleby is
having a thing with Marcia little-Smith (that's how we got that bit confused)
and that Janet Appleby is returning the
compliment with Harold little-Smith. Eddie Constantine and Roger Guerin are
working out a homosexual attraction
through wife-swapping. And so on. Updike's master subject is the relation of
individual to collective decadence, and
he tackles it with the distancing irony of a white-coated Edward Gibbon,
checking out a small branch of civilization.

To complete the analogy, there are also barbarians pressing the Couples from
without -- dull new parents at the
P.T.A., stupid suggestions at the Town Meeting. At the zenith of their powers,
the couples had routed the original
bores from Tarbox (the name of their ex-urban Utopia). But now they are
harassed themselves by a new wave of
young, vigorous bores. Thus, threatened from without, decaying from within,
perish all human communities. An
old story, but Updike has added enough scorching new observation to save it from
formula.

But the process of decay also has a more intimate side: even amoebas have their
private crotchets. What is wrong
with these particular people? Where is that death rattle coming from? Having
been chastised for explaining his
symbols in "The Centaur," Updike has buried them a little deeper this time and
isn't saying a word. The jacket blurb
concedes that one character is meant to be a priest and one is a scapegoat, but
this is a tease, because that was one of
the few symbols the reader would have got on his own.

However, when an author leaks a clue, it is probably an important one, so let us
see how the religious metaphor
works out. The couples of Tarbox have fallen into a simple religious or cultic
alignment: another of those biological
phenomena that interest Updike. The rituals are things like touch football,
sacrificial party games and ceremonial
bibulations. The priest doubles as the buffoon -- a clumsy, eloquent eunuch
named Fred Thorne, who organized the
games to "humanize" the others, and than, like some minor-league Alexander
Woollcott, scourges things along until
someone bursts into drunken tears. The scapegoat is a building contractor named
Piet Hanema, who constitutes a
running threat to everyone, by virtue of his honesty, total heterosexuality and
sense of death, all dangerous anti-social
extremes.

Since Updike's theology is Christian, it is not surprising that the scapegoat
also condemns the priest, becoming a
priest himself in the process; while Thorne obligingly takes over as victim.
But that is a private matter, a story
within a story. What matters publicly is that Thorne is the one who speaks for
the community; and this is because he
believes that life is ultimately foul and malignant, and must be guarded
against. The point of having a church at all is
to keep out the dark.

It becomes clear that this is what the other couples felt, too, when they fled
America to hole up in their quaint seaside
retreat. Exurbanism usually contains more escape than quest even in the first
year. The couples despise their priest
Thorne as only a clergyman can be despised. But they also follow his lead
faithfully, his sense of the spiritual. And
when he points the sacred bone at Hanema, there is no question of who will leave
the tribe.

But in banishing the scapegoat the priest also breaks up the tribe; in more
humdrum terms, when group-man loses
misfit-man, there is no one left to play with and the game is over. Every
community, even the most enlightened,
needs these two . . . Thorne, the fearer of life and organizer of amnesiac
activities; Hanema, the coward and the
embracer of life (the Greek word means both); also, Hanema the builder whose new
structures change the
community, and challenge its commitment to death; Hanema the adulterer, who
threatens dead marriages and builds
rickety affairs over them; Hanema the freelance acrobat who makes up his own
play without regard to the priest.
When Thorne rejects Hanema, life leaves the community, and the dead hand of
organized religion remains. The hard
core of couples still meet, still play, but less often, and with less
enthusiasm. When the organizer drives out the
prophet, even the organization suffers.

Ingenious -- and if that were all there was to the book, possibly too ingenious.
But Updike has built around this main
theme not only many lesser ones (Hanema's love life is so full of them I lost
count), but also a girding of literal truth
that stands up on its own. This is an authentically decadent community; the dry
rot is everywhere; and if the priest
and scapegoat were to stop flailing each other, it would fall apart all the
sooner. The tension between these two has
been one of the few life-giving elements.

Unfortunately, the other actors seem to exist somewhere lower down on the scale
of nature than the two principals.
They are treated as flat characters, identifiable only by their mannerisms. One
of them talks in French tags, another
burps a lot. And when for a moment, they fail to do their thing, they become
almost interchangeable.

But I don't think this is an oversight on the author's part. Biochemist Updike
probably believes wholeheartedly in the
existence of flat characters: flatness, that is, deliberately chosen and
cultivated. Repeated mannerisms like repeated
touch football are mummy's bandages, keeping out the corrupting air of life.
They do not preclude some limited
movement, some wit -- on the contrary, the couples maintain quite high standards
of mental agility, and Updike has a
chance to reveal a first-rate talent for this kind of dialogue.

The success of his social comedy comes, however, at a slight cost in
psychological precision. Updike lays on the
comic flatness, the inability of the minor characters to feel, a little too
heavily at times, in order to make a point.
This point comes out clearly in a scene that takes place the evening of
Kennedy's assassination. Fred Thorne, cruise
organizer, goes ahead with a party he was planning, because he had already
bought the booze; but everyone will
behave seriously for once, show that other side of their characters. Of course,
they don't; the party turns into the
usual fatuous revel, half-drunken and furtively lecherous; wisecracks are made
about Kennedy; seriousness is simply
beyond them at this stage. Their rituals have left them with a compulsive
reflex of Fun.

Updike has used a quote from Paul Tillich as the book's frontispiece, to the
effect that when citizens believe they
have no effect on the life of society, the result is favorable to religion but
bad for democracy. So this is one of the
things the book is about. The death of a President means nothing to these
people, locked as they are in their religion
of Play. They have been too individualistic in terms of Society and not enough
in terms of themselves: an epitaph to
the Eisenhower years. Connections are even hinted between Kennedy and Piet
Hanema -- two men who offer Life
and surprise to these dead cells of American life, these play-churches, and are
rejected. Two scapegoats.

But enough meaning is enough. The book can also be read simply as a fiendish
compendium of exurban manners --
the dinner party scenes, the protocol of adultery, the care and neglect of
children. The games are described with
loving horror. The incidents of wife-swapping are a nice blend of Noel Coward
and Krafft-Ebing. As to that style --
it is there in set-pieces, which can almost be read separately. It is most in
evidence when the subject is things and
processes: building and construction lore, home furnishing, etc., reminding one
that Updike's weakness is not too
much beauty but too much precision; he tells you more than you want to know, in
words as arcane and exact as old
legal language. Yet this does help to establish the "thingness" of his world,
the complex mineral and vegetable
terrain through which his people must crawl and mate and expire.

Tragedy is not really possible in this world, although suffering may be
constant. Updike is not a humanist. Man is
too small to fuss over inordinately. In a thousand years, the village of Tarbox
will be gone, and the waves will still
be pounding along; but as far as the stars are concerned, the waves don't matter
either. The only question that counts
is whether God exists and whether His intentions are friendly -- for us, and for
our brothers the rocks.